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Archive for the ‘Nook’ Category

It is a great time for consumers especially if you are on a lookout for an affordable Tablet. On Monday Barnes and Noble introduced their Nook Tablet as a direct competitor to Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

If you compare the two tablets on cost, both are economical. However which Tablet one must choose depends solely on his tastes, lifestyle and technical needs.

The Nook tablet costs $199 and offers same RAM and 8 GB of memory. The Nook Tablet also has a microSD slot for an additional 32 GB of external memory. Kindle Fire and Nook Tablets both offer cloud storage for the users.

To be fair to Kindle fire is priced $199 and offers over 22 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, books, audiobooks, and popular apps and games.

The Nook Tablet comes with Netflix and Hulu plus and if the user has already subscribed to these, it will be better to get a Nook Tablet. If the user has an Amazon Prime membership he will naturally choose the Kindle Fire. The deciding factor could be with which service the user is hooked on to.

EPUB files will not be supported by Kindle Fire while the Nook Tablet will not support AMZ files. Both the tablets will not support Sony or Microsoft‘s eReader file formats.

Other features of Nook include Ad free experience which is not the case with Kindle Fire. The Nook also boasts as being the lightest Tablet and also has the highest resolution screen.

The Nook comes with a wall charger while Kindle Fire does not have it and has to be purchased separately for $9.99. The screen of the Nook Tablet has a resolution of 1440-by-900, Displays HD @ 720p, 243 pixels per inch.

The screen of Kindle Fire has a resolution of 1280-by-800, Displays HD @ 720p, 216 pixels per inch. The Nook has a 1.3 GHz Dual-Core, OMAP 4470 Processor while the Kindle Fire has 1.2 GHz Dual-Core, OMAP 4460 Processor.

Overall both the tablets are almost equal in most features except a few like expandable memory and processor where the Nook scores slightly more than Kindle Fire.

Barnes & Noble is rolling out two new versions of its Nook tablet with sleek new hardware and a sharper high-definition screen. The bookseller’s move heightens the already intense tablet wars heading into the holiday season.

NEW YORK —

Barnes & Noble is rolling out two new versions of its Nook tablet with sleek new hardware and a sharper high-definition screen. The bookseller’s move heightens the already intense tablet wars heading into the holiday season.

Barnes & Noble said Wednesday that its new Nook HD will come in two sizes, one with a 7-inch screen (measured diagonally), starting at $199, and one with a new 9-inch diagonal screen, called the Nook HD+, starting at $269.

In addition to the new HD screen and a lighter body, Barnes & Noble is also increasing the services the Nook offers, adding a video purchase and rental service, allowing users to maintain different “profiles” and making it easier to browse titles in its book and magazine stores.

New York-based Barnes & Noble, the largest traditional U.S. bookseller, has invested heavily in its Nook e-reader and e-books. In its most recent fiscal quarter, sales of digital content surged 46 percent, but revenue from devices dropped partly due to lower prices. Nook prices in the May-July period were about 23 percent lower than a year ago.

The company is seeking to offset tough competition from online retailers such as Amazon.com, as consumers increasingly move away from traditional books and DVDs to electronic books and streaming video.

The Nook HD is an upgrade to the hardware and services offered by its previous tablets, the Nook Tablet and Nook Color, which Barnes & Noble is phasing out. The company will continue to sell its smaller black-and-white e-reader, called the Nook Simple Touch, for $99, and a backlit Nook Simple Touch for $139. The Nook HD runs on Google’s Android 4.0 system and includes Barnes & Noble’s own app store and browser.

Tablets are -once again- expected to be hot items this holiday. The new Nooks come on the heels of Amazon.com’s announcement earlier this month that it will offer four new varieties of its Kindle, including a high definition version of its Kindle Fire tablet with an 8.9-inch diagonal screen, which starts at $299. That compares with Apple Inc.’s iPad with a 9.7-inch diagonal screen and $499 starting price.

Apple’s iPad is the most popular tablet, and that is not expected to change. Seven out of every 10 tablets sold in the second quarter were iPads, according to IHS iSuppli. Meanwhile Amazon.com has a 4.2 percent share of the tablet market, while Barnes & Noble has a 1.9 percent share, according to iSuppli.

Even so, the category is growing rapidly. An estimated 112.5 million Americans, one-third of U.S. adults, are expected to have tablets by 2016, according to Forrester Research.

And tablet makers are jockeying to gain share on Apple. On specs alone, the new Nook presents a tough choice for consumers seeking a cheap option to the iPad this holiday, analysts say. The 7-inch Nook HD is slightly lighter and narrower, with a sharper display than the similarly priced 7-inch Kindle Fire.

“If the decision the consumer is making is whether to buy based on hardware, these new Nooks will beat out Amazon,” said Forrester analyst James McQuivey. “But that’s not the decision every consumer is going to make – hardware is only as good as the services the hardware enables.”

So far, Amazon offers more services, McQuivey said, with a bigger app store, and more extensive video library, not to mention Amazon’s vast product offerings and its Amazon Prime free-shipping service.

In an attempt to measure up, Barnes & Noble is launching a video service this fall that lets users buy and watch movies and TV shows on their mobile devices and televisions. The offerings will come from major studios including HBO, Sony Pictures, Viacom and Warner Brothers. Scrapbook and catalog browsing features have also been added.

One wild card working in Barnes & Noble’s favor this holiday: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target, increasingly threatened by Amazon’s online retail operations, won’t carry the Kindle. The retailers will sell Barnes & Noble’s Nooks, as well as other tablets like the iPad.

“This is going to be a lot of fun to watch over the next year,” McQuivey said.

The new Nooks are available for pre-order online and in stores beginning on Wednesday and will begin shipping in late October and begin arriving in stores in early November.

UK high street retailer John Lewis is to be the first store to officially stock Barnes & Noble Nook eBook readers on these shores. The chain will sell the devices from October, both in-store and online.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook eBook readers have long been a credible alternative to Amazon’s Kindle devices in the US, but until now, only Sony has successfully rivalled the Kindle’s grip on the UK market. That’s to change, however, with the launch of the Simple Touch and Simple Touch with Glowlight.

As Pocket-lint revealed earlier this month, Barnes & Noble has been looking to get into the UK for a while, and it is hoping that its partnership with “the UK’s leading electrical retailer” will allow it to break Amazon’s dominance.

“John Lewis is where knowledgeable customers turn for trusted advice on the best products to purchase, and they are a perfect partner to help launch Nook in the UK,” said Jamie Iannone, president of digital products at Barnes & Noble.

“We look forward to bringing more choice and convenience to discerning UK customers with our critically acclaimed line of reading devices and expansive selection of content.”

The deal includes the aforementioned two touchscreen devices, with future products potentially being added to John Lewis stores as available. There’s currently no word on whether the Nook Color will be stocked, although UK buyers will be able to pruchase one of the tablet devices through the soon-to-be-launched Nook.co.uk website.

Content will also be available on the new site, but it is likely that media purchases will be available through the existing American service, at least initially. As the company says, there is plenty of UK-centric content available already. “Both lightweight devices feature built-in access via Wi-Fi to Barnes & Noble’s digital catalogue of more than 2.5 million digital titles – including top-selling UK books, newspapers and magazines – plus comics, exciting Nook Apps and more,” it says.

Pricing is to be revealed nearer launch, but with the Nook Simple Touch currently retailing at $99 in the US, we’s expect that it would cost less than the Kindle Touch over here, which is priced at £109 at present.

Can Barnes & Noble shake the dominant hold Amazon has on the eBook reader market in the UK? Let us know in the comments below…